This blogpost is an introduction to Intel’s Pin dynamic instrumentation framework. Pin and the pintools were brought to my attention by Mahmoud Hatem in his blogpost Tracing Memory access of an oracle process: Intel PinTools. The Pin framework provides an API that abstracts instruction-set specifics (on the CPU layer). Because this is a dynamic binary instrumentation tool, it requires no recompiling of source code. This means we can use it with programs like the Oracle database executable.
The Pin framework download comes with a set of pre-created tools called ‘Pintools’. Some of these tools are really useful for Oracle investigation and research.

Recently I wanted to demonstrate to some people on my training, how Oracle database maintains blocks in a datafile – what happens after truncate, truncate with drop storage clause, delete, regular insert, direct path insert and so on…

Recently I wanted to demonstrate to some people on my training, how Oracle database maintains blocks in a datafile – what happens after truncate, truncate with drop storage clause, delete, regular insert, direct path insert and so on…

Recently I was investigating the inner working of Oracle. One of the things that is fundamental to the Oracle database is the SCN (system change number). SCNs are used to synchronise changes in the database. There is one source for SCNs in every instance (kcbgscn; the global or current SCN in the fixed SGA), and there are multiple tasks for which Oracle keeps track of synchronisation using SCNs. A few of these tasks for which Oracle stores and uses SCNs to keep track of progress are on disk SCN and lwn SCN.

This blogpost is about some oddities I found when using gdb (the GNU debugger) to watch memory locations of a running Oracle database. This should not be done on a production instance, and is purely for research purposes. Only use the methods mentioned in this article if you are absolutely sure what you are doing, and/or if you are using an Oracle instance that can be crashed and can be restored.

This is the second blogpost on using PL/SQL inside SQL. If you landed on this page and have not read the first part, click this link and read that first. I gotten some reactions on the first article, of which one was: how does this look like with ‘pragma udf’ in the function?

Pragma udf is a way to speed up using PL/SQL functions in (user defined function), starting from version 12. If you want to know more about the use of pragma udf, and when it does help, and when it doesn’t, please google for it.

This post is about manually calling and freeing a shared latch. Credits should go to Andrey Nikolaev, who has this covered in his presentation which was presented at UKOUG Tech 15. I am very sorry to see I did miss it.